as if something was on her heels. Oddly, or perhaps not so, she never saw a neighbor, though
at times she could hear the twin boys laughing upstairs.
The emails from her editor began a week in and became relentless. Alice responded
with apologies and promises, and sat staring at her computer screen for hours on end. She
felt nothing except emptiness, how was anything to come out of her? How were her hands
supposed to move when they felt like lead?
Things began to drop. A picture from the wall, a piece of wood from the ceiling.
It always happened behind where she was at that moment, and always after 9pm. Alice didn't
jump as high as you'd think she might because a sense of resigned acceptance had begun to
overtake her. This place was not hers. It would do as it saw fit.
The weeks turned into months and Alice fell deeper into the prison of her own
mind, never leaving the building except to quickly buy food and return, head down. She
was a writer — that was her excuse for being a recluse. But one could not be a writer if one
could not write and only stared.
She stopped calling Jacob when she heard the walls sizzle. All lights stayed off
except the pale glow from her computer screen and the red flicking notification light on
her cell phone. The messages were piling, from her mother, from her editor, from creditors,
who knows. Sometimes the bell would ring and she would hide behind her bed for hours
until she was sure they were gone. The tiny feet of the twins upstairs got louder and louder
by the day until it seemed like they were right next to her, under her, over her, behind her,
running like a battle charge.
When cobwebs started forming in the corners of the ceiling Alice noticed that they got
progressively closer to her. The ceiling seemed shorter. She stood on the kitchen counter and
could now reach it with the tippy top of her shaking middle finger. She could feel the footsteps
of the twins through that finger and all of the displaced energy from the sizzling walls. It was
getting stronger and more upset.
Now, when she was able to sleep, she would wake up to find the ceiling shifted several feet
downward. It seemed to remain in place as long as her eyes remained open. And so she tried
to remain awake at all times; there seemed to be no difference now anyway. She sat at the
computer and stared; began one word and deleted it, over and over and over again. Giggles
cascaded from above onto her shoulders. Pictures now dropped because they were being
pushed down.
Alice was being buried.
She became increasingly weak, energy pulled from her body through her fingertips, leaving
her limp and crawling to her bed. She hoped that this would be the time she couldn’t wake
up, and for a brief moment she thought of the strange convenience that the apartment was
swallowing her. Her mother wouldn’t have to buy a coffin. She would be neatly disposed of.
Summer/Fall 2015
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